jensenjaundice:

Until today I’d assumed “whitewashing” (the practice of bleaching one’s skin to alter its color to a lighter and thus more appealing tone) had all but died in most parts of the modern world.

Holy fuck was I wrong.

This year, British Vogue’s November 2011 cover features none other than Rihanna (aka, the sexiest woman I’ve ever known) posing in one of her classic fierce stances in a blonde wig. When I first saw the cover I was a bit confused why Rihanna looked so different; but, knowing Rihanna’s penchant for unconventional hairstyles, I was initially able to naively overlook her seemingly Marilyn Monroe-inspired do; but a doubletake of the whole ensemble made me realize something a little disconcerting. Rihanna doesn’t just have Marilyn’s hair, but also her eyes, her pose, even her skin. “But Vogue is a fashion magazine, that look is chic, sexy, couture.” Vapid fashion vocabulary aside, it certainly sells, right? Now, I definitely don’t want to deny or minimize the blatant and subliminal sexism the fashion industry is chronically rife with; given fashion magazine’s long history of blatant sexism, it might not be immediately disconcerting to the average reader. But what is disconcerting to anyone who loves the Barbadoan babe like I do is how fucking white Rihanna looks.

As colorlines.com so eloquently put it:

It could be the actual lighting on set, it could be that we’ve gotten used to her wearing a fire engine-red wig, or it could be that someone forget to tell Vogue’s retoucher that Rihanna is in fact black.

Now before you chime in with “what’s so wrong about white skin?” I’d like to point out that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. However, there’s certainly nothing wrong with looking black, either. And call me cracked, but in my mind a few red flags go up when I see an international organization that claims to decide what’s hot and what’s not is photoshopping a world-famous superstar in the name of fashion sense.

Apparently Rihanna hasn’t been the only one “touched-up” with the desaturation tool either. Back in January of this year, ELLE India went with a lighter-tinted version of Aishwarya Rai, the sensational Star of Bollywood making headlines all over the internet and the world, and named by 60 Minutes as the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

So why does the supposed “Most Beautiful Woman in the World” need any photoshopping? Isn’t she already the pinnacle of perfection? Thankfully, not everyone agrees. Especially Miss Rai, who stated to The Times of India that the former Miss World is “furious with the bleaching blotch-up” and is considering pursuing legal action against the magazine. 

But unfortunately Miss Rai isn’t the only celebrity ELLE’s taken to the light room. Oscar-nominated actress Gabourey Sidibe also miraculously changed colors on the cover of U.S. edition of ELLE back in October of 2010.

And judging from some more photo shoots taken in 2009, L’oréal isn’t above whitewashing either. Just do a double-take of international stars Beyoncé and Freida Pinto. Any red flags yet?

As colorlines.com journalist Julianne Hing points out: 

It’s a common, tired practice, and the routine is well-practiced: beauty companies and fashion magazines regularly lighten women’s skin (and darken the faces of black men), pissed off consumers shout back, and sometimes an apology is issued. But come the next fall collection or election season, photo retouchers are inevitably back to trying to make women of color more attractive by lightening them, and darkening the skin of men of color to make them seem more dangerous and suspect. Color, still, is everything.

At some point you have to stop and wonder just what the fuck is going on.

Fortunately, in the case of Aishwarya Rai at least, Change.org has begun a campaign asking the magazine to issue a public apology. However, in light of the situation (no pun intended), why should a campaign be necessary? Shouldn’t ELLE make a statement free of coercion by activist groups, regretting the mistake they knowingly made? I mean they do regret their “mistake,” right? Which brings me around to my point: Why the fuck is this still occurring? 

In July in India, Vaseline launched a facebook app that allows the user to lighten their profile pictures to a more “appealing” tone. In 2005 Indian cosmetics mogul Emani began a new product campaign aimed at both men and women’s insecurities, launching their new skin-whitening cream for men called “Fair and Handsome” (the women’s version of course being called “Fair and Lovely”).

Closer to home, a study conducted by Dr. S. Allen Counter of Harvard Medical School in 2003 showed some pretty frightening findings:

96% of over 300 patients in the Southwestern United States that have higher than normal mercury levels were female and all had used skin lightening products; likewise 90% of women tested in clinics in Arizona who were Mexican-American had been using the same products (2).

Women more often try to whiten their skin and as a consequence poison their bodies. These lightening creams such as ‘Crema de Belleza-Manning’, which is made in Mexico, contain mercurous chloride and is easily absorbed through the skin.

As you may or may not know, toxic levels of mercury lead to mercury poisoning, which causes neurological and kidney damage, as well as being a possible cause of psychiatric disorders. It can also cause birth defects. So it’s some pretty serious shit.

Aside from the horrors that survey alone should instill, there’s more where it came from:

Doctors in the UK were confused by symptoms presented by a woman when no reason for her weight gain, stretch or stripe marks and inability to conceive could be found. It was only after further questioning that she admitted to using a skin lightening product (1).

The product, which is illegal in the EU, was clobetasol. This is a cream containing high levels of the steroid corticosteroid. Typically this cream is prescribed for skin conditions including eczema and psoriasis, and is only to be used for up to two weeks at a time.

The UK doctors reported that the woman far exceeded the recommended usage, using two tubes of clobetasol a week for over seven years.

Such products are being increasingly used by people in a number of countries in an attempt to lighten the skin. Older people as well use skin lightening to remove age or liver spots and other skin darkening conditions.

However few people are warned of the dangers of the toxic ingredients which, as well as containing steroids, includes hydroquinone. While hydroquinone is allowed in the US by the FDA, it is banned in Europe because of the potential to cause cancer.

The list of side effects of the steroid corticosteroid is long. The most serious is Cushing’s disease, a malfunction of the adrenal glands leading to an overproduction of cortisol. Other side effects include:

* increased appetite and weight gain

* deposits of fat in chest, face, upper back, and stomach

* swelling

* slowed healing of wounds

* osteoporosis

* cataracts

* acne

* muscle weakness

* thinning of the skin

Kind of ruins that old saying “beauty is only skin deep,” doesn’t it?

So yeah, there’s that. If it wasn’t already alarming that people are getting whiter on paper, in reality the lightening products themselves have some terrible, toxic side affects. If you’re willing to lighten your skin color for the sake of appearing more attractive, you’re also willing to risk a myriad of other much more devastating skin problems (if psoriasis, eczema, acne, and thin skinning weren’t enough of an indication). In the end, the real cost of lighter skin is often paid in irreparable or even fatal damage to the user’s health, mind, and body—and often the products themselves advertise much better than they actually perform. So why does the fashion industry support this? Why, despite not only obvious health risks and the even more obvious fact that dark skin is beautiful all by itself, is lighter skin encouraged? Maybe it happens because people don’t really know all the serious risks behind skin whitening; maybe fashion companies are simply more concerned with a better quarterly statement than the health of their customers. Or maybe skin lightening is a symptom of the stigma that remains after hundreds of years of oppression, colonialism, and racism latent in our still very segregated and unequal world today. Maybe it’s all true. Whatever way you choose to view it, it’s a grim reality and a heavy price to pay, all for the ‘right look.’ But in our world, it’s the price of beauty.

(via therapsida)

youronlykimbo:

it is with a heavy heart that i write this post.  but before i divulge, i have a few things i’d like to throw out in the open.

i’m white.  middle-class.  republican.  southern baptist.  my family’s been in this country for as long as it’s been open, if not having originated here with other cherokees.  i’m just another white girl from the south.  i have every reason to be called a “white supremacist.” 

but i’m not.

and, by the way, racism is still alive and well today.  even thriving.  and that breaks my heart. 

webster’s dictionary defines racism as a “prejudice or discrimination directed against someone of a different race based on such a belief.”  this does not say anything about the offenders being white.  it is, put simplistically, one race discriminating against another race for some reason.  it is not an excuse for a person to use when he feels he has been wronged, trivial though it may be.

the phrase “you’re too white to dance” bothers me.  it makes the assumption that another person is inferior on the dance floor simply because of the color of their skin.  he’s not too white to dance.  he’s just not as relaxed with his body as you are.  anyone, of any race, color, or creed can dance. 

affirmative action is also discriminatory.  Harvard University should not have to admit a certain percentage of students of a certain race.  ideally, the college admissions process should be blind.  absolutely blind.  discussing your race should be used only for demographic purposes, and your admissions should be based solely on your abilities.  your intelligence, not your race, should get you into Harvard. 

i realize that affirmative action came about as a way to combat racism, but now it has morphed into the complete opposite.  and that’s a problem.

a truly equal society should be blind to race, and by providing affirmative action, race-based scholarships, and condemning any white person for even thinking that what they are being subjected to is anything near racist is wrong.  100% wrong. 

i can never speak out about this prevalent issue in America today.  i would likely be labeled a white supremacist.  i’m not.  i’m just sick of seeing things that i feel i’m qualified for snatched from me because i was born white instead of a “minority.” 

true racism, the kind i experience, is something you cannot discuss, lest you be submitted to more torture.  i can’t talk about this with anyone but my mom.  otherwise, i’m called a racist. 

all i want is true equality, which is far from what america has right now.

oh, child. you actually believe all this, don’t you?

I hope someday you will look back on this and be really, really embarassed.

If you don’t, it will be because you remain an ignorant child for the rest of her life who thinks being called a racist is somehow worse than actual racism.

I see you’re 18. I’m gonna guess you didn’t get into the college of your choice and now you want to blame somebody for it, so you’re gonna blame affirmative action. Because you’re entitled to get whatever you want and when you don’t get it, it means someone else stole it from you. 

Guess what? You didn’t get it. You weren’t good enough. Welcome to life. There are always going to be people more qualified and more deserving than you, and some of them are not going to be white. Get the fuck over it.

Assuming the only reason you didn’t get what you wanted is because some person of color got it that didn’t deserve it because how could they possibly deserve it more than you? You know what that’s called? It’s called you’re a racist little brat throwing a temper tantrum because the world wasn’t handed to her on a plate, so sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up and work a little bit harder next time. 

gondoleia:

by Jenn Fang

It’s almost the end of May. Do you know your Asian-American history?

Most of America isn’t aware that May is Asian-American Heritage Month. It’s a celebration that started in 1978, when Congress urged President Jimmy Carter to declare the week of May 4th ”Asian-American Heritage Week.” (That date was chosen to coincide with the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants on May 7, 1843, and with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad — built largely by Chinese laborers — on May 10, 1869.) More recently in 1990, following another vote by Congress, President George H.W. Bush expanded Asian-American Heritage Week to encompass the entire month of May.

Sadly, Asian-American history and heritage is rarely taught in U.S. public schools. So for those of you who’ve missed such curriculum, here’s a list of 10 factoids you may not have known about the history of Asian-Americans in this country:

1). The first Asians whose arrival in America was documented were Filipinos who escaped a Spanish galleon in 1763. They formed the first Asian-American settlement in U.S. history, in the swamps surrounding modern-day New Orleans.

2). In the years between 1917 and 1965, Uncle Sam explicitly outlawed immigration to the U.S. of all Asian people. Immigration from China, for example, was banned as early as 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. It wasn’t until the Immigration Act of 1965— which abolished national origins as a basis for immigration decisions — that nearly 50 years of race-based discrimination against Asian immigrants ended.

3). Because of their race, Asians immigrants were denied the right to naturalize as U.S. citizens until the 1943 Magnuson Act was passed. Consequently, for nearly a century of U.S. history, Asians were barred from owning land and testifying in court by laws that specifically targeted “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, American-born children of Chinese immigrants were not regarded as American citizens until the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that the Fourteen Amendment also applied to people of Asian descent.

4). Among the earliest Asian immigrants, virtually all ethnicities worked together as physical laborers, particularly on Hawaii’s sugar cane plantations. On these plantations, a unique hybrid language — pidgin — developed that contained elements of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean and English. Today, pidgin is one of the official languages of Hawaii, a state that is itself 40%  Asian.

5). Despite the Alien Land Law, which specifically prevented Asians from owning their own land, Japanese farmers were highly successful in the West Coast where they put into practice their knowledge of cultivating nutrient-poor soil to yield profitable harvests. By the 1920s, Japanese farmers (working their own land, or land held by white landowners that they managed) were the chief agricultural producers of many West Coast crops. In fact, the success of Japanese farmers is often cited as one of the reasons white landowners in California lobbied to support Japanese-American internment following the declaration of World War II.

6). Many of the early Asian immigrants who worked as laborers on plantations and in factories were instrumental in the formation of the American labour movement, helping to organize some of the first strikes and unions throughout the country. Japanese plantation workers, for example, engaged in the first organized strike in Hawaii in 1904.

7). Anti-miscegenation laws that denied marriage licenses between interracial couples specifically prohibited intermarriage between whites and Asians. For example, the 1922 Cable Act revoked the citizenship of any female U.S. citizen who married an “alien ineligible to citizenship,” a phrase repeatedly used in legal documents to refer to Asians.

8). Unlike Irish immigrants, who predominantly entered the United States via the Ellis Island immigration center, most Asian immigrants entered America by way of Angel Island Immigration Station. Unlike at Ellis Island, where immigrants might spend between two and five hours waiting to be processed, the Angel Island facility’s unspoken goal was to limit the flow of Asian immigrants into the country. Between 1910 and 1940, many prospective Asian immigrants were detained for as long as two years at Angel Island, stymied by U.S. immigration officials hoping to find reasons to deport them. Some of the detainees wrote poems in Chinese on the walls of the Angel Island detention facility; these poems have since been translated and collected into anthologies.

9). During World War II, Japanese American internees — including both Japanese immigrants and their American children — were forcibly relocated from their homes in the West Coast to remote relocation camps. Even still, several young Japanese-American men went on to successfully lobby the American government to be allowed to volunteer as soldiers in World War II, often to prove their loyalty to the United States. The 442nd infantry regiment, a segregated Asian-American unit composed almost entirely of Japanese-Americans, fought in Italy, France and Germany and is still the most highly decorated regiment in United States Armed Forces history.

10). In 1982, a young Chinese-American man named Vincent Chin was brutally clubbed to death by two white men in Detroit, Michigan. The crime was motivated, in part, by anti-Asian sentiment stemming from widespread loss of auto manufacturing jobs to Japanese competitors; Ronald Ebens, one of the attackers, was heard saying “it’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work” to Chin moments before the attack. Despite pleading guilty to second-degree murder, Chin’s killers did not serve any jail time for Chin’s murder, and were only fined $3,000. Vincent Chin’s death served as a flashpoint that ignited the modern Asian-American political movement.

(via depressingfacts)

sanityscraps:

missvoltairine:

“Women don’t know anything about comics because women don’t read comics!”

oh

ok

then.

“Women don’t appreciate mainstream/superhero comics, they only read manga and indie books!”

uh

huh.

“Misogyny and racism, etc, are just part of the medium/culture of comics, stop complaining about it!”

how about

no.

“The reason women, PoC, etc are so poorly represented in comics is because they don’t make any significant contributions to the medium!”

shut

the fuck

up.

“Comics aren’t a political medium.”

I don’t

really

think so.

“Superhero comics are the only kinds of comics that make money/that anyone cares about.”

oh my god

just

stop

talking

I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite post on the internet.

nezua:

Remember that in law, the questions of guilt and innocence—the determination of which could send you into a stone box for the rest of your life—hinge on what “a reasonable person” thinks, does, fears, expects, and feels. 

But what is a “reasonable” person? Who is that? How does this mysterious “Reasonable Person” think?

It’s interesting (I can’t bring myself to say “funny”) how such a lynchpin of our legal system is phrased as to appear egalitarian…when we know very well it is not. Because as soon as you apply this metric to any real-life situation, we see that what seems reasonable to some people seems delusional to others. In a manner that is not random and can be repeated with the same results.

Is it reasonable to think that any object in a black man’s hand is a gun? I’d say that’s a perception so tinged with unreality as to be paranoid—in the clinical sense. Yet, time and time again, the law (and all those whose opinions are said to make up this “law”) deems it so reasonable an assumption, in such a variety of situations, that police are exonerated from any wrongdoing when they gun down black males who happened to be carrying a wallet; a camera; a soda bottle.

Because a “Reasonable Person” understands such delusional paranoia when it comes to black men. In the eyes of our law, that is.

Is it reasonable to assume every Latino male you see is carrying drugs? Or is an immigrant? It’s reasonable to many law enforcers and judges in the USA. Prepare to be frisked and checked for ID for such reasons when you are doing nothing but walking down the stairs.

Is it reasonable to assume women of color are licentious? Sleazy? Thieving? Bad mothers? Is it reasonable to imprison them for trying to get their children a good education because they use an alternate address on the school registration? Is it reasonable, in the same breath, to let a white mother walk free when it is clear she is implicated in the murder of her child?

But let’s skip the myriad examples we could list in this vein and come out with it: Racism is the very definition of Reasonable thinking in mainstream USA. Racism is enshrined institutionally, not just by individual cops and judges; but by the spirit of the law as it is written. And law will carry out its diseased values in this way until the day a majority of minds in the country are healed. That, I’m afraid, will take a long, long time.

Would it be reasonable to the law if a person of color (engaged in no wrongdoing) assumed a cop—or, say, a neighborhood watch volunteer—who was tailing them at the train station, or on a street, or in a store, would soon unlawfully detain and beat them? Would it seem reasonable to a judge that a man of color such as me, or perhaps such as Trayvon Martin, would react angrily or try to flee such historically disastrous confrontations? 

Oddly, it would not. It certainly would not seem “reasonable” to a Judge (nor would that Judge deem it what A Reasonable Person Would Feel, Think, or Do) to be violent preemptively in such situations! Despite the many, many, many, many cases where police unfairly detain, question, harass, beat, or kill people of color for no reason at all. 

And yet, to a healthy human mind, it is perfectly reasonable to ware such repeated happenings. 

The “Reasonable” mind written into our nation’s law is not a “healthy, human” mind. It is one that fears people of color, and sees violence upon them as a normal event. It is one incapable of noting the converse, and that carries an unhealthy, irrational, fear and loathing of people for the pigment of their skin.

But let us also never forget that Black, Brown, Red, and Gold hued people have been rounded up by the earliest forms of US law and have been made to suffer, toil, bleed, and die so that this nation could be a prosperous, viable land for others to live on. And when that context is recognized, such unbalanced and unhealthy values are, sadly enough, quite reasonable.